Ronald Chen

Page Six in today's New York Post details an incident between two reporters for The Record and a Manhattan billionaire on a beach in Bay Head last weekend. Pulitzer Prize nominee Jeff Pillets and his girlfriend, Elise Young, called local police after Patrick Denihan started "bullying" them when they set up an umbrella on a public beach near his home. Young has asked New Jersey Public Advocate Ronald Chen to investigate. Click here to read the story.

Public Advocate Ronald Chen has filed a brief in state appeals court case challenging Attorney General Anne Milgram’s directive limiting the ability of nonpartisan groups to assist voters at the polls on Election Day.  The directive stops the distribution of printed information within 100 feet of the entrance to polling places on Election Day – the only exception is for exit polling, permitted if pollsters register with election officials at least two weeks before the election. 

Seema Singh's campaign for the New Jersey State Senate is not going well. A Trenton Times story details an ethics complaint against her -- seemingly at the suggestion of her former boss, Public Advocate Ronald Chen. Last week, a Gannett story revealed that she accepted campaign contributions from top utility company executives just weeks after leaving her job as state Ratepayer Advocate. And Gannett columnist Bob Ingle wrote about the potential conflict of Singh's decision to hire political consultant Steve DeMicco, the husband of Board of Public Utilities Commission President Jeanne Fox.

The ethics investigation lends credibility to comments from Corzine administration officials that Singh was on the verge of being asked to leave state government. Some Democrats say her willingness to challenge popular GOP State Senator Peter Inverso was a face-saving exits strategy.

But Singh has qualified for the first round of public financing -- the only one out of eighteen possible candidates to do that so far -- and her GOP opponent, Assemblyman Bill Baroni, hasn't said a word about Singh's bad press -- not exactly the uber aggressive campaign New Jersey watched in April when Inverso announced his retirement.